I was baptized a Methodist as an infant, but I was not aware of this until I found my baptismal certificate in my mother's effects following her death. Subsequently, I was baptized into the Cumberland Presbyterian Church as a teenager, an event that did not stir any conflict in my mother's Methodist soul. She would not have grasped nor cared about the fine points of a second baptism. Some of my ancestors in Tennessee actually entertained Bishop Francis Asbury on one of his many itineraries. So Methodism has some existence in my deepest roots.
UMC Logo
But I came to the denomination as an adult after spending 15 or so years in the Presbyterian Church where I served as a deacon, a ruling elder and clerk of session, the principal lay official in the congregation. Admittedly, my initial attraction to United Methodism came in 1990 from the excellent and well attended youth program at Duluth (Georgia) First UMC when my children were teens. However, very quickly my Calvinistic notion of election began to give way to prevenient grace as John Wesley's preaching, teaching, writing and the results of these in the American branch of the movement he created began to take charge of my spiritual life.
Without becoming too biographical, this transformation led to the following reasons why I am a United Methodist:
1. As a student of theology, the church, history, Christianity, the bible and other related matters, I found the United Methodist interest in education and learning to be refreshing, challenging and invigorating. The Disciple series, which my wife and I joined into immediately, fed my intellectual interests initially. I subsequently taught variations of this series 7 times.
2. An approach to theology that valued tradition, experience and reason along with scripture fed my longing to find a way to buy into a system of belief that had been force-fed to me as a youth and that I had largely rejected as a young adult. Maybe this version of Christianity had something that I needed.
3. Throughout my Western Kentucky youth, I had suffered through interminable every-Sunday altar calls where just one more verse of "Just As I Am" would surely bring someone down the aisle. The only experience worse than this occurred as repeated altar calls came at the end of an insufferably long revival meeting on a hot August night. When I first heard a UMC preacher say at the beginning of the last song, "Anyone wishing to become part of this congregation may do so by joining me here at the altar where you can join by profession of faith or by transfer of letter." Some may consider this too simple and unenthusiastic a call and response. I found it civilized and refreshing.
4. As I listened to UMC sermons, I heard less about sin and hell and damnation and more about love and joy and action. I began to appreciate that there was a different way of understanding religion than I had experienced.
5. As I attended Sunday School and other learning opportunities, I found a wide diversity of viewpoints as well as the opportunity to express ideas and thoughts that would have been considered blasphemy in my previous experience.
6. The deeper I journeyed into United Methodism, its practice, its beliefs, its history, the more I became convinced that this version of Christianity held about everything I needed to follow this Jesus fellow, whose teachings I had always admired, more closely. As a historian by education (Master's Degree in American History), I learned how impactful John and Charles Wesley had been on religious developments in England and America and even on the settling of America as their itinerant preachers took the gospel to the backwoods of Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana and the West.
7. I began to delve into and even teach some of the precepts of Methodism set forth in its Book of Discipline and many literary works published by its aggressive publishing houses over the years.
8. I learned about the tremendous influence Methodism had on the development of institutions of higher learning in America founding many of the top-notch universities where generations of Methodist ministers learned about the bible and their trade.
9. I observed that the Methodist Church had been one of the first to ordain women, beginning to set aside a patriarchy and resulting misogyny that had dominated Christendom for two thousand years.
10. I observed in the Social Principles section of the Book of Discipline, that this church held views in line with mine on several important issues, the need to engage the world for social justice, supporting women's biological rights, opposition to the death penalty, opposition to war, racial equality, eradication of poverty, equal rights under the law, evolution and on and on. AT LAST, I had found a church I could believe in, a church with open hearts, open doors and open minds.
But then I came across that little phrase inserted incongruously into a paragraph on welcoming all into our fellowship. You know the one I'm talking about. The one that says "the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian principles." Whoa! Where did this come from? What aberration of everything I have been experiencing in the UMC spawned this hateful phrase? Sadly, for the last several years, especially since the Tampa General Conference of 2012, I have witnessed an increasing amount of noise about these words. During that same interval, my wife, a late-life second career seminarian (Candler), has been a licensed local pastor for two UMC churches. So I have witnessed developments in the UMC from a fairly up-close perspective as a lay member of our annual conference, as a participant in almost everything any minister participates in, as a pastor's spouse and from several encounters with many aspects of the question of human sexuality that has dominated Methodist discourse.
Unbeknownst to me, the fire of debate over human sexuality had been smoldering all along my Wesleyan journey. But I was so engrossed in the excitement of becoming a United Methodist that I had not seen the fire or even smelled the smoke until 2012. As I looked across the often burned landscape, I observed many ugly aspects that had escaped my notice. Principal among these was the background noise and carefully articulated, but very sinister, message of Good News magazine that showed up on our church doorsteps regularly. Looking back, I clearly saw a homophobic vein running through every issue (The last issue contained 4 pieces opposing the Way Forward proposal.) When I checked where this insidious piece of propaganda had come from, I discovered that it had been here for 40 years!
Further research turned over an even more disturbing rock and there, in plain view, was the Institute on Religion and Democracy. Suddenly I found myself back in that Western Kentucky hot August revival night longing to escape from a message that I could never buy into. The IRD looms large on the landscape of current United Methodism, and it has apparently targeted the UMC as the last bastion of mainstream Christianity that must be destroyed in order to return to the fundamentalism it seems to long for so vehemently. And it does this in the name of democracy! Beware.
Ironically, during the same time period that I first experienced the progressive values of The United Methodist Church which turned my skeptical, agnostic leaning soul back to a more acceptable Christianity, a determined minority (?) of people and interest groups (Good News, IRD and others) were working full bore to burn down the very church I found so exhilarating. And now they have been joined by an even more sinister group. Founded (by IRD?) after the disastrous 2016 General Conference, the Wesleyan Covenant Association made up of United Methodists seems hell-bent to destroy The United Methodist Church with the hammer of human sexuality-driven schism.
Why am I a United Methodist? The question takes on a more disheartening uncertainty almost daily. The church that has given me solace for almost 40 years is on the verge, it seems, of being destroyed from within. Our last best effort, led by our Bishops, to find a way forward that avoided schism seems to have faltered on the rock of a recalcitrant Judicial Council packed by some of the same sinister influences mentioned earlier.
And so the question may no longer by, "Why am I a United Methodist" but rather "Why am I still a United Methodist?"
United Methodist layman Pete Fleming of Duluth, Ga., is retired from a position as the director of State Workforce Systems at US Dept of Labor, ETA. This is republished with his permission from the Progressive Methodists group on Facebook.